A Journey with Linux 6.0

by Dan Butler

The latest technology IPO buzz has been over Red Hat Linux. At one
point their stock price (having started out at around $14/share)
rose above Microsoft's. Regardless of what you think of Linux, the
IPO is impressive. Our own Al Gordon wrote about his experience
with Linux a while back here in TNPC. As a UNIX system
administrator by title and a Webmaster by job function I'm no
stranger to the Linux way of doing things. So I've started a
little experiment and I'll keep you posted on the progress.

I've been meaning to set up a Linux machine as a server here for
some time now. So I was at CompUSA recently and purchased the
retail version of Red Hat Linux 6.0. Using my second PC (an older
P90 with 96 MB of RAM) I was set to do the install. Putting the
boot floppy in A: and the CD-ROM in the drive I turned the machine
on. After answering several questions the install took off and 15
minutes later I had a working Linux machine running the X Window
system. This was quite a change as the installer took care of
partitioning, formatting, and installing the system. If any of you
are looking to try Linux out I would recommend trying Red Hat
Linux 6.0 over any other flavor just for its ease of use.

That was twenty-four days ago and I haven't rebooted since. In the
meantime I have networked my Windows 98 machine with the Linux
box. All of my documents and preference backups are now being
taken care of by Linux thanks to SAMBA, which is acting like an NT
server (I was able to pull that off by using the instructions from
last issue's Featured Web Site, Troubleshooters.com).

With the free-for-personal-use StarOffice I'm editing all my
Office 97 documents from Linux and testing the viability of using
it as my primary system. The only programs I don't think I'll find
a suitable replacement for are Dreamweaver, Quicken, and Pegasus
mail. In the case of Quicken and Pegasus the issue is more one of
familiarity and historical data. Pegasus has many thousands of
messages stored for me and a complex set of filters built over
time.

To get around this limitation I installed the freeware WinVNC
mentioned in TNPC #1.12. Now I can remotely run the Win98 machine
from inside Linux giving me access to the Windows applications I
have not yet replaced under Linux. Pretty slick and a suitable
temporary solution.

Next I want to make the Linux machine a firewall/proxy and
Internet dialer for all the machines that I've networked together.
After that I want to automate the backing up of various data both
on the Web and the local machines as well as schedule many of the
mundane tasks that occupy my time but that could just as easily be
handled while I sleep. I'll keep you posted on my progress and
keep you informed of helpful resources I find along the way.
Current status: 24 days uptime; 0 reboots; 0 crashes.